


The Centre Cannot Hold

by BeastOfTheSea



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Quintuple Drabble, subtext between the younger siblings if you squint very hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-17
Updated: 2013-04-17
Packaged: 2017-12-08 17:03:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/763845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeastOfTheSea/pseuds/BeastOfTheSea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things fall apart... (Summer of 1899)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Centre Cannot Hold

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer:** I am not J.K. Rowling, and I do not own the  Harry Potter series or any related characters. This fanfiction is purely for entertainment and not in any way for profit.

Elphias waits for letters that never come, sending owl after owl with no reply. He thinks of love and friendship and a thousand other things that he thought would last forever –

And he wonders, almost blasphemously, if those things existed only in his own mind.

It’s nonsense, of course. Nothing but delusion and loneliness and…

No, not loss. Albus always was a very busy wizard. He’s sure he’s just… caught up in a project. Surely.

He tells himself the sweet lie so often that he confuses it with truth.

But sometimes he wonders if he shouldn’t have been in Gryffindor.

* * *

Albus tells himself that he’s running towards the future, but he’s fleeing from the present and the past.

He’s fleeing from the act of the flawless student, the moral young man, that has haunted his every moment for the last seven years; he’s fleeing the family that will drive him mad if he lets it, the resentful glares and creeping sickness that threaten to devour his world.

Most of all, he’s fleeing the perfect lover he cannot bear to inspect too closely, and the damning vision of his own soul.

He’ll never stop fleeing. Not even on his dying day.

* * *

Gellert’s always been entranced by the phoenix.

From his earliest years, he understood that the world was diseased and molting, and that it should have been fresh and blazing; not until he learned of the phoenix did he grasp the truth, however. He grasped that the old order’s funeral pyre would bless the new order’s birth – and the power was his to set the fire. And he will. He has been shown where he erred before; he will not err again.

And he doesn’t know which he wants more – to see the new world born, or the old world burn.

* * *

Aberforth lies passed-out in the chair, a half-drunk bottle of Firewhiskey on the small table beside him; he has had all the yelling at Albus and snarling at villagers and chasing off maybe-not-there Muggles he can take for the day. Ariana pats him on the shoulder and kisses him once, softly, on the cheek.

Let the German boy take Albus. Let the sky crash and shatter on the ground. Let fire take the earth, and poison take the seas –

Just as long as Aberforth remains _hers_. She doesn’t ask for much, the stupid little freak – but she asks for this.

* * *

Ariana and he live in their own little universe, away from the brother who doesn’t give a damn about them, away from the village that scorns him, and away from the world that world hurt her.

It’s peaceful, in a way; they long ago gave up expecting better than this, and this is the best they can hope for. He tends to her; she tries, in her broken way, to be helpful. The goats don’t judge them one bit. Life staggers on. They do nothing to meddle in the outside world –

But that damned outside world doesn’t return the favor.


End file.
